19

ALOHA

“… a life stream is like a mountain river—springing from hidden

sources, born out of the earth, touched by stars, merging, blending

evolving in the shape momentarily seen…. Now it ends,

apparently, at a lava brink, a precipitous fall.”

—C.A.L.

ISOLATED FROM ANY CONTINENT BY MORE THAN TWO THOUsand miles of Pacific Ocean bask the Hawaiian Islands. The second largest bit of land in this volcanic archipelago, only some seven hundred square miles, is named for the Hawaiian demigod credited in Polynesian lore with fishing these islands, shoals, and reefs up from the sea—Maui. The most popular areas of Maui lie to the north and west. Some people are thus attracted to its opposite side, several hours away by car.

The two-lane Hana Highway parallels the tortuous lava-formed coastline, passing through forests and over streams and past waterfalls. After more than six hundred hard turns and fifty-six single-lane bridges, palm-bordered ranches, pineapple and sugarcane fields, red- and black-sand beaches, jungle and volcanic craters all converge at Hana. The town even boasts its own concrete strip of an airport. From his first visit in 1968, the warmth of Hana—the gentle moist air, the mild water, the aloha spirit—soothed Lindbergh’s soul as well as his body.

By that time, Hana had become a second home to several wealthy Americans. A few, like Sam Pryor, were especially entranced by a corner of this Shangri-la farther south, down the unpaved continuation of the coast road. Over the course of the ten miles of mud and potholes and moss-covered concrete bridges, past the waterfall-fed pools in Ohe’o Gulch (which, for publicity purposes, the local hotel christened the Seven Sacred Pools), the setting grew more lush. Orchids, hydrangea, anthuriums, hibiscus, and bougainvillea in shocking colors blossomed everywhere; and the sweet fragrance of plumeria, papaya, mango, and guava clung to the air. Here in Kipahulu a few houses were perched on the cliffs, with sudden dropoffs to the rock-crashing water below.

Amid dense foliage in this distant corner of this far-off island, Sam and Mary Taylor Pryor carved out a simple estate, a large A-frame on one hundred acres of rolling grassland—with plenty of room for his pet gibbons, which he dressed up as children. An influential figure in town, Pryor strove to maintain the purity of Kipahulu by seeing that electricity never extended that far south. Lindbergh was enthralled by the remote location, the rugged landscape, and the rustic living. “I have never seen a more attractive place to live,” he wrote Pryor upon returning to Darien. Lindbergh asked his friend to look out for any land in the area that might come up for sale, a plot on the coast where he could build a small house.

Pryor did better than that. He offered the Lindberghs five of his own acres, which they purchased for $25,000. Charles immediately drew plans and met with the builder who would construct their two-story A-frame, a modest boulder-and-concrete house with three small bedrooms and two baths. Work on the property began in the summer of 1969.

After spending a few weeks that rainy spring in the Pryors’ guesthouse, waiting for her husband’s arrival, Anne had soured on the idea of building there. “It is a beautiful coast—wild & beautiful—like a tropical Illiec,” she granted, “but not the kind of place I want to be in alone—difficult of access—isolated—inconvenient to run—³/₄ hour away on a terrible washed out road from the nearest general store or settlement—no electricity … no help—and a damp climate.” Worse than the inconvenience was the fact that Hana would contribute to her transience. “While C.A.L. can be himself anywhere & seems to find his roots in flight itself—in change—in action,” Anne wrote in her diary, “I, who long to feel rooted more & more as I grow older—… am more and more ‘déséquilibrée’ by great leaps of air-travel—time-change—& new habitats.” She tried to talk herself into liking Maui, but she kept coming back to the question of her ability to put down any roots there. “And if I do,” she wondered, “won’t they just be torn up again?”

As though demonstrating loyalty to his marriage, Lindbergh insisted on naming their houses—in honor of the shells in Gift from the Sea. The house in Darien became “Tellina,” the genus of the Double Sunrise; and the Swiss chalet was christened “Planorbe,” the French word for the snail-like Moon Shell. Touched by Charles’s gesture, Anne went along with the plan, suggesting that the “Argonauta”—a mother who leaves her shell and starts another life—be affixed to the new house in Hawaii.

Charles assured Anne that she would come to care for Hawaii once Argonauta was completed and that he intended to spend more time with his wife there. He misled her on both counts. It rained steadily the first week in January 1971, when they returned to Hawaii to move into their newly completed house; and they quickly discovered that the roof leaked. Worse than that, despite Charles’s admonitions, the architect and contractor had failed to create proper drainage for the house. A torrential downpour awakened them their first night; and muddy streams, just as Charles had foretold, sluiced through the house. They spent the next few hours out in the storm, he digging channels with a bucket while she built a mud dam. The house had not even dried out when they were invaded by armies of ants, spiders, cockroaches, lizards, rats, even a mongoose. And then Lindbergh was summoned to an emergency meeting of the Pan American board in New York.

Anne was, as she scratched in her diary, “furious to be left at this point in this place in this state. A place which is not of my choosing. I do not have friends, family, or interests here. It is not a place I would normally choose to live in alone. I only come for him—because he loves it & said he expected to be here with me. I am angry not only at him but at myself for hoping that he would at least stay here.” Argonauta did not even have a telephone, and the nearest people were ten minutes away through the mud. Propane gas motors generated electricity—one for lights, the other for appliances; but, she wrote Lucia Valentine, she would gladly trade her few modern conveniences for a little company. What she found most discouraging was “the pattern of being left” and—after all her years of weeping to her therapist and wailing in her diary—her own inability to walk away from such unacceptable behavior.

She lay awake at night in silent fury, trying to plot the remainder of her marriage. “First,” she realized, “I must harden my heart—not because I don’t love him but because I do. I must harden my heart against him, against being vulnerable to him & his leaving, against being dependent on him. I must plan out my life alone. I must learn to cope with things alone here not only physically but emotionally.” She spent the next few weeks readying the house for his return—mopping up, sweeping out dead animals, burning garbage, washing all their clothes. Through it all, it never dawned on Anne to pack her bags and go to a hotel … or to one of her other houses.

By the following year, Anne had made her peace with Argonauta. She routinely wrote up her shopping lists to Hasegawa’s General Store, an impossibly cluttered emporium back in town—including such items as rat poison, animal traps, and a machete to hack at the wild bamboo that was overtaking many of the fruit trees they had planted—without batting an eye. “I have convinced your father that we will have to spray the walls with something strong (Ecology or no ecology) to get [the ants] out,” she wrote Ansy. “It’s either them or me!” But she could not convince Charles to fire up their second generator, the one that ran the lights—“because your father likes to use kerosene lamps.” Yet again, Anne was “very disappointed” when her husband had to leave on business and cancel his return to Hawaii; but she was hardly surprised.

The night after she drove him to the airport she turned on the second generator and the lights. “It’s OK to cook supper & eat by kerosene light if your husband is with you,” she wrote Ansy, “but alone in the dark—NO!” The next morning she completely sprayed the outside of the house with more insecticide than Charles would ever have permitted. Anne’s life in Hawaii would always be a struggle against the temperamental water and electrical systems and the vermin; but over the next few weeks, she surrendered to the intoxicating charms of Hana, enjoying its beauty and taking advantage of her isolation by reading through her diaries.

Lindbergh made a point of visiting Hawaii with increasing frequency, ultimately spending as much as two months a year there. He lobbied its senators to designate its Leeward chain as Wilderness Areas and Diamond Head as a national monument. In his efforts to preserve as much of the Hana coast as possible, he became active with The Nature Conservancy, an organization that obtained lands of exceptional natural beauty and conveyed their ownership to the United States Park Service. Both Anne and Charles contributed thousands of dollars toward the purchase of land in the Valley of the Seven Sacred Pools in the Kipahulu Valley, which would allow the existing Haleakala National Park to extend more than four thousand acres from the inland crater to the sea. As he had with the World Wildlife Fund, Lindbergh solicited money by writing letters and addressing small groups. (Anne endorsed the organization as well, deeding them Big Garden Island, off the coast of Maine, which her parents had given her as a wedding present in 1929.) The Nature Conservancy would not hesitate to call upon Lindbergh whenever they needed help raising money for difficult acquisitions—from the Lubrecht Forest in Montana to the Four Hole Swamp in South Carolina. This new cause gave him still more excuses to travel.

Richard M. Nixon also called upon his services, as his new administration proved eager to include him in their environmental policy-making. With Secretary of the Interior Walter Hickel informing Lindbergh that he was placing the eight species of great whales on America’s Endangered Species List, and Secretary of State William P. Rogers encouraging him to “outline ways in which the field of conservation might be used to the advantage of diplomatic relationships,” Lindbergh accepted the President’s invitation to serve on The Citizen’s Advisory Committee on Environmental Quality, chaired by Laurence S. Rockefeller. Through this committee, Lindbergh often provided language for an administration eager to show how “Green” it was. Nixon used Lindbergh as much as possible in “photo-opportunities,” attaching his face to the Republicans’ environmental protection activities.

Similarly, Lindbergh allowed himself to be publicly associated with the space program. In December 1968, the Lindberghs had accepted the invitation of the Lyndon Johnsons to one of their last official dinners, this one honoring the Apollo astronauts and James Webb, head of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. Two weeks later they went to Cape Kennedy to watch the launch of Apollo VIII. At the request of astronauts Frank Borman, James Lovell, and William Anders, the Lindberghs joined them for lunch the day before their flight, their last meal on earth before blasting off on man’s first voyage to the moon. Lindbergh inspired his hosts with tales of early aviation and of Robert Goddard, who had spoken to him forty years earlier of a multi-stage rocket that could one day reach the moon.

The next morning, the Lindberghs observed the launching from a special area reserved for astronauts and their families. “I have never experienced such a sense of power,” he wrote one of the NASA directors afterward, having calculated that in its first second lifting off, the “thirty-six-story” rocket burned more than ten times the fuel Lindbergh had used flying from New York to Paris. After following the mission on television that Christmas at their son Land’s ranch in Montana, Lindbergh called it “the greatest feat of teamwork in the history of the world.” He and Anne sent the astronauts a congratulatory telegram, noting, “YOU HAVE TURNED INTO REALITY THE DREAM OF ROBERT GODDARD.”

Only six months later, Lindbergh accepted an invitation from Neil A. Armstrong to attend the launch of Apollo XI, the mission that hoped to put the first man on the moon. The major television networks asked Lindbergh to appear on their news programs to provide commentary on the journey, particularly as it might compare to his own epochal flight. He refused all such offers, quietly attending the event with his son Jon. After what Lindbergh himself called a “fascinating, extraordinary, and beautifully executed mission,” many drew parallels between the two shy, young Galahads of the sky. Television journalist David Brinkley, for one, could not help observing how the astronauts themselves “stood in the utmost respect, and even awe, of a man who had flown to Paris.” Armstrong would later remind others that Lindbergh had flown solo with only a small team of technical backers, while he had been part of a three-man crew backed by a team of hundreds of thousands. And, Armstrong added, “Slim flew through miserable weather and stretched the science and art of navigation to find Le Bourget. We could see our destination throughout our entire voyage.” Lindbergh heartily congratulated Armstrong afterward, adding in a postscript to his letter, “I wonder if you felt on the moon’s surface as I did after landing at Paris in 1927—that I would like to have had more chance to look around.”

In truth, the Apollo XI crewman with whom Lindbergh most empathized was Michael Collins, who circled alone in space while Armstrong and “Buzz” Aldrin walked on the moon’s surface. “Of course I feel sure that your sense of aloneness was regularly broken into by Mission Control at Houston,” Lindbergh wrote him, “but there must have been intervals in between—I hope enough of them. In my flying, years ago, I didn’t have the problem of coping with radio communication.”

President Nixon invited Lindbergh to accompany him by helicopter to the U.S.S. Hornet to receive the returning astronauts. He refused. “My declining was based on the fact that I spent close to a quarter century, after my flight from New York to Paris, in 1927, reachieving a position in which I could live, work, and travel under normal circumstances,” Lindbergh explained. He felt that the splashdown of the astronauts would, quite properly, “attract the greatest concentration of publicity in the history of the world, and that I could not avoid involvement because of my 1927 flight.” This, Lindbergh added, “would, of course, tend to take me back into a press relationship and way of life I am most anxious not to re-enter.”

Lindbergh would disappoint Nixon again just a few months later, when he went public with his opposition to the administration’s billion-dollar support of the supersonic transport. Having long considered the SST a costly, noisy, impractical polluter, he concluded in a 1972 Op-Ed piece in The New York Times: “the regular operation of SST’s in their present state of development will be disadvantageous both to aviation and to the peoples of the world. I believe we should prohibit their scheduled operation on or above United States territory as long as their effect on our over-all environment remains unsatisfactory.”

During the span of the Apollo XI mission, Lindbergh hopscotched from Tellina to Argonauta, with stops in San Francisco and Seattle. It was a typical week of travel for him. As Anne had feared, the building of a third house encouraged her husband’s travels rather than curtailed them. Whatever time they scheduled to be together invariably got cut in half by some environmental emergency. In 1969, he circled the globe five times, stopping wherever he felt he could do good.

That October, he went to Minnesota, where he helped establish the Voyageurs National Park on the Kabetogama peninsula at the Canadian border. For two days he explored the rugged region by air, boat, and on foot with Elmer L. Andersen, the former governor, and Russell W. Fridley, director of the Minnesota Historical Society, publicly pronouncing it “an extraordinary place” and telling the press it would be “tragic” not to make it a national park. Before leaving the state, Lindbergh visited his childhood home in Little Falls, then being restored as a museum. He enjoyed a reunion there with his seventy-seven-year-old half-sister, Eva Christie, whom he had hardly seen since their father’s death forty-five years earlier. After little more than an hour together, he was gone.

Obsessive about remaining active, affixing purpose to every action, Lindbergh became the conservation movement’s most tireless freelance. No person or place on earth was off-limits to him; no time was wasted. When a canceled flight to New York in the winter of 1969 left him stranded in Los Angeles for a few hours, he rented a Volkswagen and drove to Santa Barbara, to inspect the site of a recent oil spill. He followed up a five-day survey trip through Baja California in 1968 with a mission to Mexico City in 1972, voicing his concerns about the gray whale and the need to protect a dozen areas in Baja because of its extraordinary flora and fauna. Upon learning in 1970 that Akihoto wanted to see the Tingmissartoq, which was on display in Osaka for the World’s Fair, he squeezed in a trip to Japan because he thought he could promote conservation firsthand with the Crown Prince. At several meetings in 1972 he successfully encouraged His Majesty King Taufa-ahau Tupou IV of Tonga to establish parks on his exotic islands. And in a handwritten note to Prince Philip of Great Britain, he suggested that a word from him to the Chief Minister of the Fiji Islands would go a long way in the marine conservation efforts there. In his efforts to see Brazil make the Reserve Forestal do Tumucumaque a national park, Lindbergh flew to Rio de Janeiro and met with a cadre of ambassadors, government ministers, and newspaper owners; he also flew to Brasilia, where he delivered a written appeal from the WWF to President Costa e Silva and appeared before the Senate.

In late 1968, Lindbergh traveled to the northern frontier of Brazil, near the Surinam border, where he lived for several days among the Indians in the Tumucumaque region. Members of the tribe subsisted primarily on the meat of wild pigs, birds, and monkeys killed by bows and arrows. Not completely unaccustomed to visitors, the tribesmen amused themselves by serving the flesh of wild animals to their civilized guests, delighting in watching their reactions. Most visitors, Lindbergh was told, passed up the bowl of stewed monkey; but he treated himself to three helpings. “Do you really like it?” one of the natives asked through a Catholic monk who translated. “Yes,” Lindbergh replied with a straight face, “it’s almost as good as human flesh.”

As the fine line separating primitive man from the rest of the animal kingdom increasingly fascinated him, Lindbergh’s conservation work kept drawing him to the Philippines. His love affair with this island nation began with the tamaraw, a wild buffalo just forty inches tall, which was indigenous to Mindoro, the fifth-largest island in the Philippines. By 1966, when Lindbergh first learned of the animal at IUCN headquarters in Switzerland, an estimated one hundred remained on earth, all prey to hunters, disease, and other elements of civilization.

In January 1969, Lindbergh arrived in the Philippines, without advance notice and with only the names of a few contacts. One was Thomas Harrisson, an English anthropologist whose work was partially funded by the IUCN. Upon their meeting, Harrisson observed how Lindbergh “lent his whole influence and energy” to conservation efforts for ten days. Harrisson arranged for Lindbergh to meet Dr. Sixto Roxas, one of the country’s leading bankers and an economic adviser to President Ferdinand Marcos, who in turn scheduled a meeting between Lindbergh and Marcos himself. Lindbergh—staying at the Embassy as a guest of Ambassador G. Mennen Williams—expected ten minutes of pleasantries with the President and his wife. But he found them both “sincerely interested in conservation,” and they kept him at Malacañang Palace for two hours. Lindbergh returned to the palace later in the week for a luncheon with Marcos’s cabinet. He also visited the national legislature and met with the press.

Lindbergh made friends everywhere, especially on the wild, mountainous Mindoro, which he surveyed on foot and by helicopter. There, Professor Harrisson observed, “Lindbergh very effectively spoke to the crowds assembled to see him and enormously impressed them with the visible fact that a man of such world status could be interested enough to visit them for this conservation purpose.” When Lindbergh returned to the Philippines in June, he learned that Marcos had ordered a seventy-five-thousand-hectare preserve around the principal tamaraw area and assigned thirty guards to protect it. Within two years, the tamaraw’s numbers were increasing.

During these visits, Lindbergh also learned of the plight of the monkey-eating eagle, the largest eagle in the world, indigenous to Mindanao. In August 1969, Lindbergh rallied local support there by addressing a radio audience for the first time in twenty years. He even allowed a newspaper reporter—Alden Whitman of The New York Times—to accompany him on his travels, sending dispatches of his missionary work around the world. When Lindbergh returned to the Philippines that October, Marcos presented him with a Presidential Plaque of Appreciation “for inspiring and spurring action to save the country’s prized fauna … from extinction; and for his pace-setting advancement of the cause of wildlife conservation throughout the world.”

While in the Philippines, Lindbergh learned of sixty tribal groups that still inhabited its islands, many subsisting at prehistoric cultural levels. President Marcos expressed interest in protecting his country’s heritage by appointing an adviser on national minorities, a controversial young man named Manuel Elizalde, Jr. “Manda,” as he was known to his friends, was an heir to one of the largest conglomerates in the country—interests that extended from sugar to steel. A Harvard-educated, hard-drinking playboy, he turned his life around once exposed to the losing struggle the tribal peoples were waging against land developers. He established an organization called Panamin—an acronym for Private Association for National Minorities—the goal of which was to ensure the welfare of these people forgotten by time.

Finding a kindred spirit in Lindbergh, Elizalde gave him a brief tour of some settlements of the uncivilized tribes, generally spending a few hours, on one occasion the entire night. “As you know,” Lindbergh wrote Elizalde after his second visit to the Philippines, “I am deeply interested in primitive peoples and the impact our civilization is having on them…. and the ways you are bringing assistance to them. I am thoroughly in accord with your philosophy of making assistance available to these minority peoples, but of not attempting to push them too far beyond their needs and desires.” With every intention of returning soon, Lindbergh asked if it would be possible to arrange for him to “live quietly” among them. Because he slept well on splitbamboo floors and would carry his own blanket, he said he needed only a corner in one of the native huts.

When Lindbergh returned to Manila in October 1969, he rented a Consolidated-Vultee L-5 from the Philippine Air Transport Service and flew anthropologist Dr. Robert Fox of Panamin to an abandoned logging strip on the northeast coast of Luzon. There, beyond roads and radio contact, he lived among the semi-naked, black-skinned Agta tribe, sleeping on the beach beneath a leaf-sheaved lean-to. During his stay he learned that businessmen from the cities were threatening the lives of the Agta by deceitfully acquiring their territory. “If they keep on taking our land away,” an Agta hunter told Lindbergh through an interpreter, “we will put poison back on our arrows.”

Lindbergh lived among other tribes the following June, this time bringing Alden Whitman and a photographer. He hoped Whitman would report the crises the aborigines were facing, not only the shady real estate deals in Mindanao, Mindoro, Palawan, and northern Luzon but also the cultural war the “Christian-Filipino world” was waging against them. Lindbergh recognized it as a “war of shame,” one in which the minorities were told they were ignorant, their dress was silly, and their names ugly. Elizalde’s policy was to encourage the tribes to respect their own cultures and to partake in legal services if they wished to remain separate from the rest of the country or in social services if they wished to assimilate. Lindbergh became a director of Panamin.

On July 18, 1970, he rode with a busload of Panamin officials through South Cotabato on Mindanao. Passing through Surallah, where opposition to Panamin was known to be high, a truck sat before them blocking the road to the next town. The Panamin bus driver blasted his horn and slowed down, but the truck did not move. Instead fifteen men suddenly appeared, armed with automatic rifles. A member of the Philippine Constabulary who worked with Panamin emerged from their bus wielding his automatic weapon, and rifle barrels poked out of every one of its windows. Lindbergh was armed with a 9mm. Swiss HK submachine gun. Gunbolts clicked all round, but the ambush ended there.

Realizing the tension between Panamin and many Christian settlers, however, Lindbergh suggested to Elizalde that they call on the Mayor of Surallah—who had stood behind the truck that night with a hundred armed men. “No shooting was intended,” he explained to Lindbergh when he and Elizalde returned to the region, “but if anyone had shot, it could have been very serious.” After two or three days together, Lindbergh was made an Adopted Son of Surallah and Honorary Chief of Police, and the Mayor had become an adviser to Panamin. “I remain highly apprehensive,” Lindbergh wrote Alden Whitman; “but as of the time we left South Cotabato, there was a reasonably friendly working relationship between Panamin and the Christians of Surallah.”

Through his repeated visits to the Philippines, Lindbergh cultivated a cordial relationship with President Marcos, who remained sympathetic to his causes despite growing opposition from businessmen eager to exploit the land. Within a few years, Panamin was able to help the Agta in northern Luzon by establishing a school to teach the children how to maintain their property rights. Panamin also helped the more culturally advanced Taboli in southern Mindanao by sending troupes of their native- costumed dancers to Manila and other countries to display the beauty of their culture.

During their now occasional visits together, Anne came to understand the hold the Philippines had on her husband. “It is not simply wild-life & wilderness and its preservation,” she wrote in her diary, “… nor is it entirely his study of & fascination with the impact of civilization on primitive life (which one can see there as in few places in the world) but it is also his extreme interest & admiration for what some Filipinos … are attempting to preserve & to build in their country—a multi-racial nation, living harmoniously together & preserving their divergences and dissimilarities.” The country was one great laboratory for Lindbergh, where the laws of human nature could be tested. For all her festering resentment because of her husband’s chronic absence, Charles’s ever-expanding mind never ceased to amaze his wife.

“I must say Father has really done it this time!” Anne wrote daughter Ansy in April 1972, from Argonauta, where she had just heard on the radio that “Lindbergh & the anthropologists have been living in isolation with … the world’s only surviving cavemen … on the side of a steep mountain deep in this southern Philippine rain forest.” For one of the few times, media reports about Lindbergh did not exaggerate. A cave-dwelling, primitive tribe called the Tasaday had been discovered in the mountainous rain forests ofsouthern Mindanao, a people with but the slightest knowledge of the world beyond their secluded foraging grounds; and Lindbergh helped organize the first expedition into their colony.

Jumping from a helicopter onto a treetop platform, which Panamin had previously erected in the rain forest, seventy-year-old Lindbergh felt he had leapt through time. “In seconds,” he later wrote, “my environment had transformed from that of civilization to that of a stone-age-cave-dwelling culture. I felt that I might have been on a visit to my ancestors a hundred thousand years ago.” Across a sharp-toothed mountain ridge and a “deep, thorny, rainsoaked valley” loomed the Tasaday caves. The expedition pitched camp in the forest.

The next morning, Lindbergh and his Panamin colleagues climbed the slippery mud trail until they reached the high caves at the jungled cliff edge. A few small, brown men with black, bushy hair, wearing loincloths, stood at the openings of the caves above. Grabbing at vines, Lindbergh hoisted himself up and into the thirty-foot-deep dwelling, where eighteen people sat around a pair of fires. “No sign of any attempt to improve or modify cave in any way although generation after generation apparently has lived in it—probably for centuries,” Lindbergh noted.

Observing the Tasaday over the next week, Lindbergh had never seen “a happier people.” The jungle supplied them with all their needs, and they knew of no threats to take anything away. Elizalde managed to ask the tribesmen what they wanted most from the outside; and one of them said, “We do not know what to ask for because we do not know what we want.” When asked how long they had lived in that cave, one replied, “Since time began.” Outside, over the sound of the rain pattering on his tent at night, Lindbergh heard human howls.

With the discovery of the Tasaday came practical and ethical questions as to how the Philippine government should treat them. Exploitation—from the media and foresters—was sure to follow. Lindbergh recognized that this Panamin expedition helped paved their way; but he also felt that they were in a position to protect the tribe preemptively, for logging roads would otherwise approach their caves within a few years. Lindbergh and Panamin returned to the caves the following month, bringing cloth for blankets and a doctor with medicines. By then, in response to a Panamin request, President Marcos had proclaimed a reserve around the Tasaday. Panamin offered them their choice of futures, isolation or integration. The natives said they would like to remain in their cave culture, as they had since the dawn of man. But within a few months the outsiders proved to have infected the tribe with curiosity, which gradually drew them beyond the forest.

Lindbergh’s intense interest in the Philippines was as visceral as it was intellectual. While living among the primitives, he found himself stripping his life of “civilized accoutrements” and going native himself. On one of his Panamin expeditions, he was especially attracted to a young woman. Anne would later discover a photograph of the nubile Filipina, one provocative enough for her to assume that Charles had slept with her. She and her husband never discussed the liaison, just as they had never discussed Anne’s earlier affair with Dana Atchley; but there was no doubt in her mind that it had occurred. Lindbergh had skinny-dipped all his life; but now, back at Tellina, he took to wading nude in the Long Island Sound at low tide, wallowing in the ooze and covering himself in mud, like some primitive man. Then he would splash himself clean and sunbathe in the hollow of the big rock on the edge of the cove, naked.

His boundless awe of nature drew Lindbergh into searching for its creator. Always a loner rather than part of any flock, Lindbergh had long eschewed formal religion. But in 1971, he retreated one day to the Regina Laudis Priory in Bethlehem, Connecticut, at the suggestion of Anne, who periodically found solace there. Communing with the Benedictine nuns on their pastoral grounds, Lindbergh was surprised, as he wrote one of the sisters afterward, by “the welcome, the singing, the sense of earth, the spiritual atmosphere, and with these qualities, a broadness of viewpoint and sense of humor that result in a character I have never encountered before in a religious organization.” He would return several more times over the next few years, when he felt the need to center himself, a chance to search his soul.

Lindbergh showed signs of mellowing, appearing more frequently in public, even dressing in black tie without complaint. His non-conservation activities of late were a chary selection from the hundreds of invitations that continued to arrive every year. He accepted the National Institute of Social Sciences Gold Medal Award in 1968 and was made an honorary fellow of The Society of Experimental Test Pilots in 1969. At both ceremonies, his message was not much different from the one he delivered in 1973 at the dedication of the Interpretive Center at the one-hundred-and-ten-acre Lindbergh State Park in Little Falls, Minnesota. From the front porch of his boyhood home, he told two thousand well-wishers, “I believe our civilization’s latest advance is symbolized by the park rather than by satellites and space travel.”

Although he still had no interest in celebrating the past, Lindbergh took part in commemorative events if he thought the attendant publicity might honor unsung friends. And so in 1968 he accepted, in a private ceremony, an Honorary Doctorate of Science from Georgetown University, largely because of the care with which they curated the Alexis Carrel collection. And after spending several afternoons in Sands Point, Long Island, when his friend Harry Guggenheim was dying, Lindbergh appeared at the 1973 posthumous dedication of Falaise as a county museum. There he spoke to interviewers and strolled freely among the guests through the twenty-six-room Norman mansion where he had written “We,” courted his wife, and found sanctuary from the press with his new bride. Upon reaching his former bedroom, one woman noticed the four-foot-by-seven-foot bed and could not help asking, “General, how did you ever sleep in this bed?” Anne could not resist interjecting, “Oh, he likes to curl up.” That made Charles laugh, all the way down the grand staircase.

He also made exceptions for the military. In 1969, he attended a reunion in Colorado Springs of the 475th Fighter Group, his war buddies from the South Pacific. And in 1973, he accepted the National Veterans Award, presented on behalf of twenty-eight million American veterans. Both events were happy occasions for him, public reminders that the man many accused of having been a traitor was, in fact, a patriot.

More than thirty years after his explosive Isolationist statements, Lindbergh still refused to recant anything. And though he said he never cared what the public thought of him, private actions occasionally revealed otherwise. He sometimes blurted out nonsequiturs, which revealed that his fall from grace stuck in his craw. One weekend, while David Read, a young psychiatrist friend of the Lindberghs, was visiting, Charles said suddenly, “Dave, they didn’t pay attention to the rest of the speech.” Noticing that Lindbergh suddenly looked hurt and puzzled, Read asked what he meant. Lindbergh told him about that night in Des Moines in September 1941. “I did explain,” Lindbergh said with great sincerity, “why the Jews would be concerned.”

Ever since he had become famous, Lindbergh had been aware of false statements about his life and beliefs; and a generation later, many of those mistakes were reappearing in new books and articles. After discussing this problem with his closest new friend, William Jovanovich—a dynamic young publisher who had become president of Harcourt, Brace & World—Lindbergh reread the journals he had kept between 1938 and 1945 and decided to publish them. He believed those two thousand entries were, “to the best of my ability, an accurate record.”

He cut his six hundred thousand words by a third. While he prided himself on doing no rewriting—not even to correct the occasional bad grammar—several excisions were of an editorial nature. Without fully realizing that some of his comments were anti-Semitic, he intuitively deleted many of them. His admiration for Germany’s accomplishments got soft-pedaled. The result of his labors, which he squeezed in between his travels, was a thousand-page tome.

The Wartime Journals of Charles A. Lindbergh was published in September 1970 to great fanfare. It received attention not only in book reviews but also on editorial pages and the front sections of news magazines, reigniting the old America First debate. Reaction to the book fell almost entirely along political lines, echoing prewar attitudes. Lindbergh’s own introduction to the book revealed a stubborn adherence to the beliefs he had voiced decades earlier, a failure to admit any mistakes.

In order to defeat Germany and Japan we supported the still greater menaces of Russia and China [he wrote]—which now confront us in a nuclear-weapon era. Poland was not saved. The British Empire has broken down with great suffering, bloodshed, and confusion. England is an economy-constricted secondary power. France had to give up her major colonies and turn to a mild dictatorship itself. Much of our Western culture was destroyed. We lost the genetic heredity formed through aeons in many million lives. Meanwhile, the Soviets have dropped their iron curtain to screen off Eastern Europe, and an antagonistic Chinese government threatens us in Asia.

In reviewing The Wartime Journals for the New York Times Book Review, Professor Eric Goldman wrote perhaps the most objective appraisal that appeared anywhere, evaluating Lindbergh’s style as well as his substance. Commenting on Lindbergh’s visit to Camp Dora, Goldman wrote: “In a five-page entry so moving that it may well find a place in American literature, he cries out against ‘the shame and degradation’ of which nations are capable. He did not add what he might have been witnessing if the United States had followed the leadership of men like himself, who let the finest in themselves be overwhelmed by addiction to the apparent present and fear of the onrushing future.” The book became a solid bestseller and was a semifinalist for a National Book Award. Lindbergh’s fan mail included letters from Nixon as well as Kennedys (“That family—and me—admire you more than anyone,” wrote Jacqueline Onassis). But Wartime Journals did not foster new opinions of Lindbergh so much as reinforce old ones. It did, however, temper some of the long-standing hatred toward him, as it revealed at least a man who had been loyal to his country.

By the 1970s, Lindbergh was devoting as much time to other people’s writings as he was to his own. While writing “sketches” and chapters of what he was calling an “autobiography of values,” Lindbergh also wrote introductions to books on Maui, the Vanguard rocket, and the Tasaday tribe, as well as Michael Collins’s autobiography, Carrying the Fire: An Astronaut’s Journeys. He provided detailed answers—both by mail and in person—to authors researching the lives of many of his friends, from Henry Ford to John P. Marquand; and he was especially generous with anyone writing about Dr. Carrel. Lindbergh championed the work of several authors enough to recommend them to William Jovanovich—including Bruce Larson, who wrote a biography of Lindbergh’s father, and Wayne Cole, who wrote an account of Lindbergh’s battle against intervention.

Lindbergh also began to read a new generation of biographies about himself, all of which he found so riddled with errors that he typed up detailed memorandums of the mistakes and filed them with the Library of Congress.

No writer received more of Lindbergh’s encouragement than his wife. Several ecological pieces she wrote for Life were but a suggestion of the extent to which he impacted upon her work. She credited him further with goading her into a major project, a “companion piece” to his war journals. The process of sifting through more than a quarter century of diaries and letters and editing them into publishable form would occupy Anne for the next decade. She was ambivalent about the process, approving of it in principle but dreading “the reaction, the invasion of my privacy, the publicity, the insultable letters.” The more he pushed her, the more she realized her diaries would be “a counter & filler-in for the misapprehensions & false pictures given by some of the reaction to his.” The first volume, Bring Me a Unicorn: Diaries and Letters, 1922–1928, was published in 1972 to critical and popular acclaim, enough to get her through the next few years of entries, which climaxed with the kidnapping and killing of her child.

“Even though I have read the last part (1932) six or seven times—perhaps more,” Anne wrote in her diary in April 1972, “I still go blind with tears at places. It is so far in the past and that girl who suffered is not me. She died & was reborn again—slowly. It is because I’m reading about a stranger that I cry.” When the book, Hour of Gold, Hour of Lead, was published the following year, hundreds of thousands of readers felt they were reading about a friend. Another three bestselling volumes would be published over the next seven years, making Anne Morrow Lindbergh one of the century’s most popular diarists.

The hardest volume for Anne to assemble proved to be the years between 1939 and 1945, which she entitled War Within and Without. Her purpose in publishing it, she wrote in a long introductory essay, was “to show the unwritten side of [my husband’s]Wartime Journals, to say the things he could never say. By looking at the inner side of a tapestry, one can often uncover patterns and colors that reveal a complexity and meaning invisible on the surface.” To her friend Lucia Valentine, Anne wrote, “I must not struggle so hard to defend him, but there are sides that must be shown—the record should be there. Only then can I be free to let him go—to let the public figure go.” She would publish no new books after that.

After a half-century of the practice, Anne became dilatory in her diary-keeping. Preparing the earlier works for publication was only part of the reason. The Lindbergh marriage had become a one-sided affair, at Charles’s disposal whenever he chose to partake; and that proved too dispiriting to record. When they were together, he expected her attention to be focused on him, his self-absorption reaching comical proportions. He sometimes forbade her to pick up the telephone when it rang; and if he found her spending too much time gabbing to friends, he sometimes grabbed his gun from the closet and threatened to shoot the phone. When Anne replaced some seventy-five-year-old mattresses in the guestroom with a new set—bought on sale at Bloomingdales—it sparked a sermon on her contributing to the fall of civilization. He became obsessed with the general breakdown of law and order and the upsurge in anarchy, and he often groused about “what’s happening to the country.” In some cases, he had just cause—especially in discussing airplanes, which had become crime zones, as terrorist hijackings were becoming epidemic. He would say “It’s no time to be living around a big city.” And she would reply, “It’s no time to be flying between homes.”

Their conversations became more contentious, with Anne constantly wondering when her husband would reappear next. The children provided all the emotional support they could. “I don’t think [Father’s] fair to do this to you again, even without torrential rainstorms,” Reeve wrote her mother in the spring of 1972, when Lindbergh was returning from yet another trip to the Philippines. “What does the monkey-eating eagle got that you don’t got, I’d like to know.” But with Jon pursuing oceanographic interests and raising salmon in Washington, Land ranching in Montana, Ansy writing children’s books in France, and Reeve teaching in Vermont—all raising children of their own—there was little any of them could do for their mother.

Ironically, Scott was the one who brought his parents together, but only for a moment. After sharing their shock over the news of his marriage, Anne’s feelings turned to remorse while Charles’s turned to rage. She visited Scott on her visits to Europe and wrote sympathetic letters to him. He stopped seeing his son and fired off curt, and occasionally cruel, letters. “I am disgusted with you and ashamed of you,” he wrote one year after Scott’s marriage; “but I still care for you, deeply. What relationship this will bring between us in the future, I do not know.” A few more rounds of letters in 1969 brought them to an impasse. “When you awake to what you have been and are doing to yourself,” he wrote on June second, “if I can be of help please let me know.” Closing the letter, “My love to you always,” he stopped writing him.

Through Anne’s visits and reports from his other children, Lindbergh remained apprised of Scott’s progress, of his graduate work in animal psychology at Strasbourg University and his creating an eighty-acre research preserve in the Dordogne, where he and his wife studied South American howler monkeys. But Lindbergh maintained his silence for almost three years. In April 1972, shortly after his seventieth birthday, he tried to break the deadlock, writing, “I do not know whether I will see you, hear from you, or write to you again. If not, then I would like to leave this with you as my last message…. You have the ability to succeed in about anything you seriously apply yourself to. But I want to again emphasize to you that professional and material success, no matter how great, is trivial in comparison to what you make of yourself as a man.”

Scott invited his father to visit him and his wife in their animal habitat. But Lindbergh refused, still disapproving of “the standards and the way of life you have apparently laid out for yourself.” While he said he would always welcome Scott’s letters, another year of silence lapsed between them. In April 1973, Scott sent his father a compelling description of his work, which involved studying monkey societies and relating their feelings to human emotions. Lindbergh replied, recalling the days when he and Dr. Carrel had talked of raising apes on a small island. Then he chilled his response by adding that he hoped the second half of Scott’s life “is not going to be expended largely in raising and experimenting with monkeys.” He asked, “Are you going to be content as an American living on an inherited income in a chateau in southern France while the world about you is aflame in many areas and in a state of flux unparalleled in history?” The former silence returned.

There was, in fact, an unspoken explanation for Lindbergh’s sudden reaching out and his irrational withdrawals. This decade-long struggle over control had become part of a larger battle of body and emotions in which Lindbergh found himself engaged. During a routine physical examination in October 1972, Dr. George Hyman had discovered an abnormal node that proved to be a lymphoma; another irregular node further suggested cancer. At the end of the month Lindbergh checked into a small room in the Harkness Pavilion at the Columbia-Presbyterian Medical Center in New York as Mr. August to have the growths removed and biopsied. The diagnosis had been correct, and on January 31, 1973, he began three days of radiation therapy.

Lindbergh had a severe anemic reaction to his treatment and had never felt so terrible in his life. For the next few months he was weak and tired. He shed thirty pounds from his already lean frame, and he looked drawn. He and Anne told everyone, including their children, that he had contracted a virus during his travels. He chose to recuperate in Maui, where the Hawaiian sun brought some color to his face. He was soon eating again and sleeping well.

One morning, he walked to the Pryors and asked his friend a question with enough nonchalance not to arouse any suspicion. “Sam,” he queried, “where are you going be buried?” Pryor was startled but answered without hesitation. “Right behind the little church I’ve restored about twenty minutes walk from here.” Lindbergh said he would like to see it; and they hiked down a dirt road to the Ho’omau Congregational Church, built by missionaries from Connecticut more than one hundred years earlier. Far enough off the main road to go unnoticed, and sheltered by a banyan tree, pines, and coconut palms stood a small, white house of worship, made of lava rock and stucco. From its wooden tower, the original missionary bell tolled every Sunday. Inside, light flooded through six large windows onto the white walls, unadorned except for one simple wooden cross and a few pewter sconces. Two chandeliers hung over the ten pews. Outside lay an old Hawaiian burial ground, with some new graves set among the palm trees. Beyond this shaded area, where the Pryors had already interred some of their apes, a pasture stretched to a high cliff that looked onto the Kipahulu Bay, white water crashing over a jagged mound of lava rock near the shore.

Walking cliffward, at the center of that great sward, Lindbergh asked, “Who is over there?” Upon learning that the land was available, Lindbergh arranged with the state and church authorities to secure a thirty-foot-wide burial plot on that very spot. Lindbergh helped Pryor restore the church, and some days he could be seen clearing foliage from the neglected graveyard.

Later that spring, Lindbergh suffered from an excruciating case of shingles, which limited his travels and cost him another ten pounds. His blood count low, flu and other minor maladies plagued him for months. He discouraged visitors, though he and Anne did entertain Imelda Marcos and Manda Elizalde at lunch one day in Darien. While he never completely recovered that year, he put up a good front, carrying on his essential business, sandwiching trips to his three houses.

Anne finally got to spend more time with her husband. “This, of course, has a reaction on my life,” she wrote her sister, “because it virtually isolates me from the people I used to see when he went off…. What I have to face is a new and different un-balance in our relationship and in our life. And I must somehow learn how to right it … so that I am not either exhausted, or so frustrated that I lose my temper over minor and unrelated details, or so depressed because of the apparent monotony or sense of imprisonment, that I draw in to my shell & give up.” Months passed between diary entries. When she finally found a moment to catch up in her little “Cuckoo Clock chalet” above the main house in Switzerland, she wrote, “It has been a year of pressures & anxieties. ‘Alarms and excursions.’” Regular blood tests and additional biopsies suggested that the radiation had Lindbergh’s cancer in remission.

His vitality never completely bounced back, but his appetite, weight, and spirit did. Into 1974, Lindbergh made one nonessential trip to Europe that year. In February, he met with J. Paul Getty at Sutton Place, the billionaire’s Tudor castle outside London, to garner extra publicity for the $50,000 Getty was donating to the World Wildlife Fund. That month, Lindbergh turned seventy-two, the mandatory retirement age from the Pan American Board of Directors. Although he was made an honorary member of the board, he was no longer obliged to make any trips anywhere.

At the start of the year, the Lindberghs changed their legal residence from Connecticut to Hawaii. He planned future journeys—including the Midwestern Governors’ Conference in Minnesota and a tour of Brazil in July—but he traveled only to Maui, resting there four times by May. During that fourth visit, he and Sam Pryor and a Hawaiian named Joseph “Tevi” Kahaleuahi, a local bulldozer operator and builder, walked around the graveyard of the Ho’omau Congregational Church and marked a burial site with thick stakes and twine. Back in Darien, Lindbergh spoke of summering in Switzerland.

On June second, however, he came down with a fever, which spiked to 104 degrees. Lindbergh checked into Harkness Pavilion and found himself bedridden for several days. After two weeks, he seemed strong enough to return home, but the doctors worried about their inability to correct his blood-count. He still did not want anybody to know how ill he was; and he forbade Anne from informing the children. By chance—“miracle from heaven,” wrote Anne—Jon showed up in New York on business mid-June. He insisted on seeing his father, whose condition could no longer be completely concealed.

The “virus” that kept Lindbergh’s fever from breaking was, in fact, cancer that had invaded his lymphatic system, affecting the bone marrow, which produced “bad blood.” He began to respond well, however, to a new drug. After more than a month in the hospital, he was told he could go home and, with continued progress, on to Switzerland for the summer. On the third of July, he decided to take a “trial run,” by attending a Pan Am meeting midtown Manhattan. Starting out, he felt so good he thought of taking the subway—to save the cabfare. After the effort of walking from his hospital room down to Broadway, however, he hailed a taxi. The outing was enervating but successful. He began a course of chemotherapy and blood transfusions.

Lindbergh returned to Tellina on Saturday, July seventh. It was brutally hot, and the trip home exhausted him. He slept most of the day, with a fever and chills. But he began improving every day after that, walking around the house, sitting on the terrace, eating and sleeping well. Jim Newton called from New York, and Charles invited him to supper, regaling his friend with tales of the Philippines until midnight.

While the results of Lindbergh’s chemotherapy would not be immediate, those of the blood transfusions were. They stimulated him, and he was told he could have them as often as necessary. As he seemed to be on the rebound, the Lindbergh children were given the complete story of their father’s health, though Anne never spoke the name of his disease, euphemizing it as “the basic problem.”

Despite the regular freshening of his blood supply, Lindbergh’s strength ebbed. After a few weeks of test results, it became obvious that “the basic problem” was worsening. He canceled his trip to Minnesota, and the possibility of going to Switzerland became more remote every day. On Wednesday, July twenty-fourth, he returned to the hospital, where the doctors told Anne they could no longer offer any hope of recovery. They would step up his chemotherapy, but they believed he could survive but a few weeks at most. Still fighting off the possibility of death, Lindbergh asked all sorts of medical questions. “It is as if the fire of the disease were raging in him, devouring him,” Anne confessed to the Reverend Mother at Regina Laudis. “Since his nature has always had so much of fire in it, this seems rather fitting.”

Lindbergh’s children gathered around him, Ansy coming in from Paris, Reeve from Vermont. Land telephoned his younger brother in France; and though Scott was then suffering from hepatitis, he was prepared to visit if his father so wished. Thinking it would take a miracle for the two most stubborn members of the family ever to speak to each other again, Anne did everything in her powers to enable it. She prayed; and she suggested that Scott write a letter to his father first—“to make some kind of a bridge.” It did not have to be a long letter, she told him—any subject that might open a dialogue. Scott wrote at once, mostly about his work; but there was no mistaking the underlying purpose of his missive. “I am getting increasingly uncomfortable about the number of years that are collecting into the time that has passed since I last saw you,” he wrote. “… I’ve been all wrong in waiting for the problems to dissipate into a more or less distant past, in anticipating that my work would eventually create new levels on which we could get together. If lack of consideration and negligence are at the base of our differences, then what I’ve done, relegate our relationship to temporary oblivion, could only increase those differences.” Anne read the letter to Charles in the hospital, and he was visibly pleased.

Scott immediately flew to New York and made his way to the Harkness Pavilion. Alone in Room 1148, he and his father talked for hours. “Charles has seemed so much happier … with this painful knot loosed,” Anne wrote from the hospital waiting room to a friend. “And it may save Scott’s life in the future. It would have been a hard burden to live with.” Anne shared the news of the reunion, and her husband’s condition, with his half-sister, Eva Lindbergh Christie Spaeth—from whom Charles had been estranged most of a lifetime. “Now they find they are alike much more deeply in thought and philosophy and work,” Anne wrote Eva on August tenth. “He feels his own thoughts and beliefs being continued in Scott’s work and writings. It makes him very happy and I am so grateful we have had this time for both of them.”

Word leaked that Lindbergh was lying in the Intensive Care Unit at Columbia-Presbyterian, and well-wishing messages streamed in. Anne read him those she thought would please him most—from President Nixon, the DeWitt Wallaces, and Eva, who said she was “proud to know you are my brother.” Jim Newton flew to New York for a bedside visit. Lindbergh’s dear friend and publisher Bill Jovanovich closed a long letter by noting, “I am, as always, at your service and in your debt as your happy companion and unwavering friend. You have my good wishes, Charles, and my hope and my love, and that is the whole of it.”

Over the next few days, Lindbergh accepted his fatal condition. On August fourteenth, he telephoned Jovanovich and said, “It is time we talked. Can you come to Columbia-Presbyterian?” When the publisher arrived, Lindbergh spoke to him about the book of memoirs he had been assembling over the years. He asked Jovanovich to read four hundred pages of manuscript to determine “whether it is any good and if it should be published.” Jovanovich read all night and returned to say that it was and it should be. Lindbergh then directed him to the brown leather bag in the hospital room, which contained half the pieces that would make up the final manuscript. Another thousand pages, he explained, were at Tellina or in his locked files at Yale. As instructed, Jovanovich drew up a contract and a letter to the Trustees of Yale in which Lindbergh’s wishes were spelled out, that Jovanovich should serve as editor as well as publisher, that he should “establish a sequence” out of the sometimes unconnected pieces of manuscript, and that he should inform the reader that while the writing was all Lindbergh’s, “parts of the text were subject to editing consistent with his purpose.”

Over the next two days, Lindbergh weakened visibly, though his voice grew stronger. On Friday, August sixteenth, he asked for a copy of his will, which he had amended the preceding year by removing Scott’s name as either a trustee or a beneficiary. He went through the fourteen-page document, and, in a discernibly feeble hand, printed Scott’s name five times, careting him back among his siblings. Later that day, he shook up everybody in the room with an extraordinary request. “I want to go home,” he said, turning to Anne, “—to Maui.”

Most of the doctors would not hear of it. An argument could be made to let him return to Tellina, but Argonauta was out of the question. Dana Atchley understood the patient better than any of the others, however, and knew nobody would be able to change his thinking. He said he would sign him out of the hospital. They reached Dr. Milton Howell in Hawaii, who had discreetly assisted in treating Lindbergh’s condition over the past two years, and Lindbergh said to him, “Milton, I have eleven physicians here…. and theyadvise me that they aren’t going to be able to help me any more. I have eight to ten days to live, and I want to come back home to die. I’d rather spend two days alive on Maui than two months alive in this hospital here in New York City.”

Howell tried to dissuade him, arguing that his doctors there knew his condition best and that he thought nobody would sign a certificate of fitness to travel. But Lindbergh’s mind was made up. He asked Howell to locate a house where he might spend his last days, one closer to the medical clinic in Hana than Argonauta. Howell arranged for Lindbergh to move into the guest cottage belonging to Jeannie and Edward Pechin, friends who had just left on a cruise to Alaska.

Jon Lindbergh took charge of transporting his father from Harkness Pavilion to Hana. Dr. Atchley recommended an Air Force ambulance plane, but Sam Pryor, then in New York, said that would be politically difficult. He offered a special plane from his fleet, but Jon said his father’s principles would not rest well with that or with a private charter. A regularly scheduled United Airlines flight seemed the only alternative, despite the high risk of publicity. Pryor said Lindbergh’s stretcher could be placed over the first-class seats, and privacy curtains could enclose the entire compartment of the plane. Lindbergh was thinking of making the flight sometime the following week; but Atchley said he did not think they should wait that long. They targeted Sunday morning.

On Saturday, Lindbergh received two blood transfusions. Revitalized, he spent much of the day reminiscing with Jon about growing up in Minnesota. He called Sam Pryor, who said United Airlines was prepared for the special situation and that the airline doctor would sign the consent form necessary for so unfit a passenger. Then one of Lindbergh’s attending physicians announced that he and all the doctors involved in his case had unanimously agreed that the plan was “medically unsound” and “incompletely thought out.” He said he wanted at least thirty-six hours in which he would put together a small medical team to accompany the patient. Lindbergh asked the doctor to elucidate, in strictly medical terms. The physician described the worsening pneumonia, the spreading cancer, and the recurring infections; he mentioned the possibilities of hemorrhage, discomfort, lack of privacy in the plane, and an emergency landing should he become worse en route.

Lindbergh praised the doctors for having done “a magnificent job,” but he realized they were fighting a losing battle. He did not want to chance “another 36 hours,” which might bring enough deterioration to prevent his going at all. The doctor accused the patient of turning his back on medical science. Lindbergh replied that science had done all it could, that the problem was no longer medical but philosophical.

William Jovanovich appeared twice that day, to discuss the final manuscript and contract. Before leaving, Lindbergh gazed at his friend and asked, “Do you think I am dying well?” Jovanovich said yes.

Later that day, Lindbergh discussed his burial plans with Jon. He described the plot he had arranged at the Kipahulu church and the kind of grave he wanted, right down to its drainage system. Scott was not sure whether their father meant for him to come to Hawaii, where he had never been. But there was no question in anybody else’s mind about his making the trip. That evening, Lindbergh spoke by telephone to his daughters, who had gone with their children to North Haven. Anne, Scott, and Jon packed up Lindbergh’s belongings and returned to Darien. For the sake of logistics, Lindbergh insisted they meet him the next morning at Kennedy airport, without stopping off in the city.

Bill Jovanovich arrived at the hospital at 6:30 that morning and met one of the attending doctors, who said there was a good chance Lindbergh would die in the air. The publisher rode with Lindbergh in the ambulance to the airport, where Sam Pryor awaited, having arranged the getaway without any publicity. A little after eight, the family and Pryor stood in the first-class section of the United jet, leaving room for a pair of stretcher-bearers to carry Lindbergh aboard. As they were about to transfer him onto the bed that had been made over two knocked-down seats, Lindbergh, referring to Jovanovich, said, “I know you are strong fellows but let my friend here hold my middle: I am pretty tall.” After doing his part, Jovanovich leaned over and kissed him twice.

By the time Sam Pryor said good-bye, Lindbergh’s eyes began to well up with tears. The curtain was drawn around the bed, which was six inches too short for its patient and was lengthened with a stack of pillows. The family took their seats on the opposite side of the cabin; and then the other passengers, unaware of the proceedings up-front, boarded.

United Airlines flight 987, a DC-8, departed at 10:30 that morning. Lindbergh nodded off through much of the trip and drank some water and milk along the way. Scott administered his father’s medicine during the journey. For the most part, Anne sat by his side, watching the country pass below, commenting to her sons that this trip was analogous to the historic flight in 1927, as “No one believed he could do either and survive.”

As the Hawaiian Islands came into view, Lindbergh perked up and looked out the window with obvious pleasure. Approaching Honolulu, the captain wanted first to circle Maui, providing his special passenger with a panorama of the island. Lindbergh rejected the idea, noting that all the others on board had schedules to keep.

Land Lindbergh had traveled from Montana to Honolulu, arriving two hours before his father. He used the time to ensure Lindbergh’s smooth transfer to an ambulance plane, a twin-engine Beechcraft, which Sam Pryor had arranged to be drawn up to the side of the jet. As he entered the first-class cabin of the United jet, Land was shocked to see how much weight his father had lost; but he took heart in the brightness in his eyes and the firmness of his handshake. A young medical attendant cursorily checked Lindbergh over and cheerily said he would be up in no time. Despite the young man’s kind intentions, the fatuousness of the remark made Lindbergh angry, and he told him off. As the patient was moved from one plane to the other, three pilots stood off in the distance, holding their caps in their hands. Land accompanied his parents in the Beechcraft, his brothers following a little later.

Lindbergh had asked Milton Howell not to bother meeting him at the Hana airstrip, but the doctor disobeyed. Before deplaning, Lindbergh motioned him to his side. “Now, it is understood why I have come here, isn’t it?” Lindbergh asked. “I know I am going to die…. I know that I have only a short time to live. I don’t want anything unnecessary. I don’t want any heroics.” He asked Howell to assist in making his demise “a constructive act.”

The Pechins’ small guest cottage sat atop a hill, its living room opening onto a large lanai with a beautiful view of the coast. Oxygen and intravenous equipment were set up in the bedroom, which looked directly out onto tropical foliage and the Pacific. Lindbergh appeared extremely pleased to be there; and to the sound of the surf below, he fell asleep.

The new day began with Dr. Howell outlining his basic program, which was to keep Lindbergh as alert as possible, though never at the expense of comfort. He explained that the malignancy had already blocked one lung and there were indications that it had spread to the other. Once it attacked the pleura or heart covering, there could be severe pain, which Howell said he would control with sedatives.

Lindbergh began this journey as he had all his others, with checklists. Usually in the mornings, when he was feeling strongest, he funneled all his energies into final preparations, particularizing how he wished each step of his departure carried out. “Details,” Jon noted in a log he kept, “to a minute degree that appalls the rest of us. How do you talk about such things with someone that close to you who is dying. It may be rational enough, but it takes some getting used to…. He is looking at death as one last adventure and throwing himself into the preparation to the fullest.”

Lindbergh started with the grave, which he wanted Tevi Kahaleuahi to prepare in the traditional Hawaiian style. Island superstition generally restricted the digging of a man’s final resting place until he had died; but, having already been condemned to death, Lindbergh urged Tevi to start digging right away. A local Kahuna, a holy man, blessed the site before Tevi put more than a dozen workers on the job. The fourteen-by-fourteen-by-twelve-foot pit was partitioned, leaving room for Anne, and lined with lava rock, two feet thick along the sides. Tevi inspected every rock for size, shape, and smoothness. “Father was obsessed about drainage,” Jon observed; and that led to a lengthy argument about the removal of a wild plum tree in one corner of the burial plot. When Tevi said he would be sad to see the plum tree go, Lindbergh agreed to let it stay.

The Lindbergh sons worked on the grave as well. “It might seem that helping build your father’s grave even before he died would be very strange,” Jon Lindbergh wrote that week. “But in actuality it felt an intimate, very loving family project. To do something physical in this respect was very strong therapy for me.” More vigorous since arriving in Hana, Lindbergh thought for a moment that the move there might just have bought him a few extra days, possibly weeks. But on August twenty-third, he felt “rather punk” and suggested adding men to the digging crew.

Lindbergh asked his friend John Hanchett, vice president of the Hana Ranch, to oversee the building of his coffin. He wanted it made by hand of native wood—rough-sawn, flat-sided and -topped, with no curves. Two ranch hands built the box as specified, using one-inch-thick planks of eucalyptus robusta, known locally as “swamp mahagony.”

Another discussion dealt with the lining of the coffin. Lindbergh wanted several layers of different biodegradable materials, starting with a tarpaulin on the bottom. On top of that he wanted cowhide, until Hanchett said the only hides readily available were greasy and smelly. Anne suggested an old Hudson Bay blanket that Charles had once given his mother. Calls were made to the family members stateside to locate it, and it was express-mailed that day. Lindbergh wished to be covered with tapa cloth and cotton sheets from Argonauta. Nobody could find pure cotton sheets there, so he settled on fifty-percent cotton, fifty-percent polyester.

Lindbergh also asked Hanchett to order his headstone, a slab of granite two-feet-by-three-and-a-half feet and almost a foot-and-a-half thick—so heavy that it would not be disturbed. It would come from the Rock of Ages quarry in Barre, Vermont. He wanted the sides rough-hewn, polished on top only where it would be inscribed. From a sample book Lindbergh selected a simple typeface to be cut one-quarter of an inch into the stone, just deep enough so that the elements would keep it clean. Below his name, he wanted to note the dates and places of his birth and death, Michigan and Maui; and beneath that, he and his wife and their three sons agreed on a two-line passage from the 139th Psalm, which suggested a supreme belief in the Lord: “If I take the wings of the morning, / And dwell in the uttermost parts of the sea.” The remainder of the passage, which would not be inscribed, went on to say: “Even there would Thy hand lead me. / And Thy right hand would hold me.”

They turned their attention next to the funeral services. Lindbergh wanted one short service before the burial, a prayer and hymn at the gravesite, and a slightly longer memorial service a day or two later. He insisted on no eulogy. Instead, he wanted passages read from a broad range of thought, evidencing his belief that “no one culture or religion had a monopoly on truth.” Anne presented a potpourri from which he selected readings from Isaiah, St. Bernard of Clairvaux, Gandhi, St. Augustine, the Hindu Mundaka Upanishad, and a Navajo prayer. Anne also offered her husband a sampling of hymns. While singing one she thought suitable, Charles shook his head and said it was no good. “But,” Anne replied, “the music is by Bach, and you can’t do better than that.” Charles said, “The music is all right, but the words are corny.” Anne wondered what to do, until he resolved the situation: “Let’s just have Hawaiian hymns,” he said, “then nobody will know what they mean.”

Lindbergh also requested that at least part of the service be conducted by a Hawaiian deacon, Henry Kahula, who was the proprietor of the local Chevron station. Anne paid a call on him, and he suggested a number of Hawaiian poems, prayers, and hymns, which he would sprinkle through the service. Lindbergh wanted the funeral kept private, noting that anyone from Kipahulu was welcome. He asked Dr. Howell to see that his pallbearers, local men who were working on the coffin and grave, attended in work clothes. Howell protested, explaining that they would want to show their respect by wearing their finest clothes. Besides, he told Lindbergh, “You can’t tell people what to wear.”

Lindbergh then asked Milton Howell if he would perform perhaps the most difficult task, that of representing the family to the press. Lindbergh felt that the articulate physician, who had once served as Mayor of Glencoe, Minnesota, could best protect Anne. When it came time to face the inevitable barrage of journalists, Lindbergh said, “I would like for you to answer the questions just as they are. I would hope that it would be kept dignified—which you do very well.” To Howell’s surprise, Lindbergh said that he wanted the editor of the Maui News—and nobody else—to be informed of the impending death right away, so that when the moment came, the obituary would be practically written. By establishing this exclusive arrangement, Lindbergh believed he could buy his family a few extra hours. Indeed, the island was already talking.

A minister from California named John Tincher had been assigned to the Congregational Church in Hana for the month of August. The young reverend was just a few days from leaving the island when he learned that Charles Lindbergh had recently been flown in to die and that he was staying in a secret location. One day, while shopping in the little Hana Ranch Grocery, Tincher could not help noticing the small woman in front of him at the cash register who seemed to be buying out the store. Tincher watched as Anne Lindbergh signed for her provisions. After making his purchase, he followed her to her car and introduced himself, indicating that he was “available if she wanted to talk to somebody at this time.” On Friday, the twenty-third, she drove to his beach house and left a note with her telephone number. He called, and they met the next day for an hour. Neither committed to his conducting a service, because Tincher had to leave the island the following Tuesday.

When they needed a break from the emotionally difficult tasks at hand, Anne and her three sons went to Argonauta, where they hacked away with machetes at the mimosa brush, cane grass, and banana patches that had grown around the house. Exerting themselves in the hot sun made them feel they were sweating out their “troubles and tensions.”

For hours at a time, between Lindbergh’s naps or in the evenings, at least one family member would sit with him as he reminisced—about his mother and “Brother,” about the early days of aviation, about the war. America First was on his mind as well; and he told Land one day, “Don’t let your mother spend a lot of time defending me.” Each night he wanted an update on the progress of his grave.

Surrounded by their sons one evening, Anne asked Charles if he would describe what he was feeling, because, she said, “you’re going through an experience we all have to go through.” He said he had never before realized that “death is so close all the time—it’s right there next to you,” and that he felt totally “relaxed” about it. “It’s harder on you watching than it is on me,” he added. One day, they tried to get him out on the lanai to behold the beautiful view, but the effort proved too great. “I can’t do this,” he said; “I have to go back in.” He lost a little ground every day and said he had already come close to crossing over two or three times.

Each of the sons had enough private moments with his father to prevent later regrets about things left unsaid. In surviving the last two weeks, Lindbergh had made up for the lost time with Scott. Their mutual love and respect became obvious to them and everybody around them. “Great relief to M[other],” Jon observed in his diary. “A ray of light in a rather dark scene.” Having left his wife alone to care for their troops of primates, Scott had to return to France. The whole family, however, rejoiced in the reconciliation, including Ansy and Reeve, who remained in North Haven, receiving regular reports.

On August twenty-fifth, the grave and casket were completed; and Jon returned to Seattle. He expected to see his father again but realized there was a good chance he would be too late in returning.

Lindbergh’s breathing became labored that afternoon, and he felt chest pains. Dr. Howell, who had been visiting twice a day, gave him aspirin with codeine, half-grain tablets which Lindbergh broke up, swallowing quarter-grain bits only when necessary. Because he steadily drank enough fluids, Howell never had to hook him up to an intravenous drip. He did keep an oxygen mask at Lindbergh’s side, however, which he replaced that afternoon with a larger breathing apparatus. “Now, Doctor,” Lindbergh asked that Sunday night, “is the calibre of the oxygen tube really large enough to supply me with the amount of oxygen I need?” In fact, it was not, as the lymphosarcoma was filling his lungs. Later that night, reaching over to adjust a valve so that he might get more air, his arm dropped and he drifted into a coma. Dr. Howell sedated him and planned to move him to the clinic the next day at nine. Anne, Land, and a nurse remained by his side through the night, his wife holding his hand.

In the morning—Monday, August twenty-sixth—Lindbergh seemed at peace. After an early breakfast, Anne and Land went into the bedroom and found him barely breathing. The Howells arrived a few minutes after seven; and after examining him, the doctor said, “He’s going now.” Anne took his hand and could hardly believe how lifeless it had become since the night before. Land instinctively wanted to hold his father, but he knew how much he disliked being touched. And so, with his mother at one end of the bed, he sat at the other, putting his hand on his father’s foot. For more than ten minutes they sat there as the room became increasingly still. “And then,” recalled Land, “he just went.”

Silently, everybody left the room, leaving Anne alone with Charles. She gave him a last kiss. She wanted to have a longer moment alone with him, but there was no time. He had prepared everybody to move him from his bed to his grave as swiftly as possible, not only to beat the invasion of the press but also for legal reasons.

Lindbergh had insisted that he not be embalmed. A “natural” burial was legal in Hawaii so long as it occurred within eight hours of death. But the law also prohibited interment until a death certificate had been signed by the coroner, and he was on “the other side” of the island. At Lindbergh’s urging, Dr. Howell had already made preparations. He had filled out the certificate with everything except the date of death; he had apprised the coroner of the situation; and he had his son standing by to drive the document to him in Wailuku, two hours away. Howell followed all of Lindbergh’s instructions to the letter. He dispatched his son; he summoned Tevi, on a construction job on the other side of the island; he notified the police, asking them to provide security around the cottage and the church; and he called the newspaper editor, telling him that Lindbergh had died and asking him to hold the news at least until noon.

Minutes later, the local radio station got word. Not three hours after Land had called Jon in Seattle to tell him their father had died, he heard it on the radio. A few women rushed to the church to sweep it clean and to strew ginger stalks and hibiscus onto the deep window ledges. John Hanchett and a dozen ranch hands pulled up to the Pechin guest cottage and unloaded the heavy eucalyptus casket. The Hudson Bay blanket arrived that morning.

Tevi, flown into Hana by private plane, arrived at the house to perform the most personal duties of the day. Lindbergh had asked the sixty-three-year-old laborer to dress him. Anne handed him the outfit Charles had selected—a pair of old, gray cotton pants and a khaki shirt; he would wear neither a belt, because of the metal buckle, nor shoes. Tevi, John Hanchett, and two ranch hands then carried the dressed corpse to the blanket-lined coffin and set him down, tucking in the sheets exactly as prescribed. Just as one of the men prepared to hammer down the lid, Anne called out, “No, wait.” She approached for a final look and lost her composure. With tears in her eyes, she placed four white flowers inside the casket, which was finally nailed shut. Eight men carried the heavy box out to Hanchett’s blue pickup. Tevi hopped in back so that he could ride alongside the coffin, which was covered with canvas.

It was early afternoon when the local police sergeant began his drive from the Pechin cottage down to the Kipahulu church, followed by Hanchett’s truck, and a small convoy of other vehicles. As they passed the Ohe’o Stream, none of the sightseers at the Seven Sacred Pools had any idea that the funeral cortege of Charles Lindbergh was passing by.

The service was scheduled for three o’clock, and Milton Howell had said he would talk to the press at four. But by two o’clock, the coffin had been carried inside to the front of the church, and all the intended guests were present—no more than fifteen people, most of the men in their work clothes. Candles flickered in the sconces and the smell of ginger filled the small church. Knowing that the serenity of the moment could not last much longer, Anne and Land asked for the service to begin.

In a moment of absolute tranquility just before the Reverend John Tincher spoke, a barefooted Hawaiian woman, who occasionally helped with the housekeeping at Argonauta, walked to the front of the church, her apron full of flowers. She knelt by the coffin; and, placing one blossom at a time, she covered it with a blanket of plumeria. Exactly as scripted, the service of silent prayer and Tincher’s reading of five selections took less than twenty minutes.

Because the casket was so heavy, six or seven men carried it back to the truck, and John Hanchett drove it to the gravesite. It was difficult lowering the coffin into the deep stone-lined hole; and, as it was done, Tincher spoke the words of committal. People tossed flowers into the tomb, and Land actually climbed in to place one white plumeria blossom on the coffin for his mother. Henry Kahula led the singing of a Hawaiian hymn with three other voices; and the music, Land recalled, “just soared out and away with the wind and the crashing of the waves below us.”

Only one local reporter was present for the service, respectfully in the background. By three o’clock, when the mourners were driving off, the first television crew was on its way to the church, not a half-mile away. The dozen members of the press who followed felt they had been tricked. But Milton Howell explained the situation and invited them to his house, where he answered all their questions.

For the last time, Charles Lindbergh captured the attention of the world media. News of his death commanded the entire upper-left corner of the front page of The New York Times. The paper paid further homage with a two-page obituary by Alden Whitman, a column of tributes, including one from the President of three weeks, Gerald Ford. The Times editorial, titled “Passing of a Hero,” spoke of Lindbergh as “both the beneficiary and the victim of a celebrity experienced by no other American in this century.” It was fitting, it noted, that he chose to die and be buried “in the utmost simplicity, far from the crowds that had hailed and repelled him in his lifetime.” Beginning that afternoon, close to one thousand messages of condolence began to pour in, from around the world.

At two o’clock the following afternoon, two dozen people arrived at the Ho’omau Church for Lindbergh’s memorial service. Another dozen reporters had arrived early to cover the event; and Anne Lindbergh invited them to take seats in the rear pews. Jon and Sam Pryor sat up front with Anne and Land. John Tincher, in his final hours on Maui, conducted the multifaith service, again with Henry Kahula. Anne was especially moved by the singing of the last hymn, a sublime rendition of “Hawaii Aloha.” The entire program lasted less than thirty minutes, without any suggestion of Lindbergh’s accomplishments. When it was over, Anne thanked each person who attended, even the reporters. She would return to the mainland later that week, and settle into a progressively reclusive widowhood in Connecticut, reducing her life to visits with her children and seventeen grandchildren. In time, she stopped going to Switzerland and Hawaii at all.

Lindbergh’s Autobiography of Values would be published in 1978, exposing a more philosophical, even poetic, man than most readers expected. It concludes on a transcendental note. “After my death,” he wrote, “the molecules of my being will return to the earth and the sky. They came from the stars. I am of the stars.”

And on certain days at that quiet graveyard overlooking Kipahulu Bay, the molecules collide in such a way that the water and sky blend into one seamless spectrum of blue—a deep sapphire far out to sea that brightens almost to the color of glacial ice as it ascends, that very same pale but radiant blue that the sky over Sweden sometimes casts in the late summer.